The Library of Congress has been holding the National Book Festival for 25 years and they are celebrating with resources for you. Well to be fair, they always have resources for free because there are our National Book Festival and like our National Museums in DC, it is free.
This year's event is coming in September and on the LOC Blog, they started their promotion by releasing videos from EVERY YEAR in the past.
Here is the intro from that post:
The Library of Congress National Book Festival will celebrate its 25th year on September 6, 2025. For this year’s festival information, visit the 2025 National Book Festival website.
To honor the occasion, we are taking the 24 weeks leading up to this year’s festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to highlight two videos each week from past National Book Festivals, from the festival’s first year in 2001 to 2024. Each week, we’ll highlight a past festival year with a video from an adult writer and one from a children’s writer. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.
The videos they are sharing in this post are from George RR Martin and Meg Cabot.
We are always looking for author content to share with our patrons. Ways for them to connect with their favorites. Well, this is a great easy and FREE way to do that. Add these videos to your websites and socials. But today I want to focus on an even better spot to link these videos of conversations with some of our most popular authors-- YOUR CATALOG.
We do not leverage the power of the link in our catalogs. I know there is resistance in some larger systems, but this resistance has NO MERIT. Yes, even when the department in charge gives you a very good reason, I am telling you--- THEY ARE WRONG.
The number of times I have been told by those above me, especially in tech services, that something I want to do that helps my readers, that puts them first, well, it's a lot. I have said more times that one on this blog and to people in person-- the library rules you claim are intractable are not. They are arbitrary rules that we have made about how books are organized. They are not a law and changing them-- even in large shared systems -- will not take the entire library cataloging system down. And most importantly, there is no library jail.
Many of our rules also work against our readers and their library experience. Many of our rules are actually meant to keep books on the shelf rather than get them into the hand of our readers. And the fact that people get so mad when you demand they allow you to add things that engage readers and connect them to your collections to your catalog, shows their true colors. They would rather everything be neatly organized on the shelf than in the hands of a reader.
Let's take an example from the real world. I started talking about shelving books in series order NOT alpha order back in 2018. As I argued then, no one reads a series in alpha order, so why do we insist on shelving them that way. (I know why but again, it is a dumb librarian preference and is the opposite of getting books into readers hands more easily).
At the time, very few libraries did this and MANY people told me to be quiet and stop instigating, that it could not be done. Well, guess what? It could. And these days MANY libraries shelve their books in series order. What did it take? It was not some huge software upgrade. It was simply those of us serving readers working with our catalogers to improve discovery and come up with a solution.
Never take NO for an answer when your goal is to put the reader and their experiences first.
So, the people who tell you that you cannot add local information to your OPACs are also wrong. I have talked to people at a few large consortia and while they agreed that the first instinct is to say no, they are 100% ways to add reader focused info like links to author interviews or to locally made readalike lists and more.
Ask why they are saying no. Is it because you will ruin the record or make it messy? That reason is not valid. Fields can be created in all OPACs for links to be added. Is it because they don't want to go back and worry about fixing dead links? Again, not valid. Records need to one edited all of the time. Arguing to not use the technological advantages of an OPAC to engage with your readers because some time in the future the link will be bad is not valid. Here is your counter-- that is like saying we should not add any new books because one day they will be weeded.
Yes it is that simple.
I am using this post today as the start of a new series I am calling "Be a Gate Opener." I will have a longer post describing what I mean by the term "Gate Opener" soon, but today I am beginning the conversation with you so that you can start the conversation at your library. The ultimate goal is to create a new program on this topic as well. But baby steps. Start with these excellent, free videos that we, as citizens of this country, own so they can be shared without copyright worries.
Click here for more information any time of the year via the homepage for the National Book Festival. But use this as a great chance to fight for adding more discovery power to your OPAC.